The shocking resignation of President Trump’s National Security Adviser Michael Flynn has sent shockwaves through the country and set us upon a very perilous course going forward.

Not only were unelected officials within the bowels of Barack Obama’s national security apparatus able to use the surveillance state to spy on Flynn’s calls but they also engaged in the criminal act of selectively leaking the information obtained to the media with the intent to damage the incoming administration.

This is fascism folks and despite the left’s caterwauling about the perils of Trump it was already here.

While Trump’s enemies were busily erecting their scaffolds and collecting rope, some in the media dared to break with the lynch mob in order to express alarm at how politically motivated operatives of a former administration were so easily able to assassinate Flynn by media.

Despite the usual coordination by the mercenary media there were a few outliers who are warning of the grave consequences of the unfolding deep state overthrow against the legitimately elected president and his choice of folks to run the government.

National security blogger Eli Lake took to Bloomberg View to point out that what just happened to Flynn is exactly the way that business is conducted in police states.

There is another component to this story as well — as Trump himself just tweeted. It’s very rare that reporters are ever told about government-monitored communications of U.S. citizens, let alone senior U.S. officials. The last story like this to hit Washington was in 2009 when Jeff Stein, then of CQ, reported on intercepted phone calls between a senior Aipac lobbyist and Jane Harman, who at the time was a Democratic member of Congress.

Normally intercepts of U.S. officials and citizens are some of the most tightly held government secrets. This is for good reason. Selectively disclosing details of private conversations monitored by the FBI or NSA gives the permanent state the power to destroy reputations from the cloak of anonymity. This is what police states do.

AND

In normal times, the idea that U.S. officials entrusted with our most sensitive secrets would selectively disclose them to undermine the White House would alarm those worried about creeping authoritarianism. Imagine if intercepts of a call between Obama’s incoming national security adviser and Iran’s foreign minister leaked to the press before the nuclear negotiations began? The howls of indignation would be deafening.

In the end, it was Trump’s decision to cut Flynn loose. In doing this he caved in to his political and bureaucratic opposition. Nunes told me Monday night that this will not end well. “First it’s Flynn, next it will be Kellyanne Conway, then it will be Steve Bannon, then it will be Reince Priebus,” he said. Put another way, Flynn is only the appetizer. Trump is the entree.

Over at The Intercept, Pulitzer Prize Winner Glenn Greenwald – no fan of Trump – threw in his two cents:

President Trump’s National security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, was forced to resign on Monday night as a result of getting caught lying about whether he discussed sanctions in a December telephone call with a Russian diplomat. The only reason the public learned about Flynn’s lie is because someone inside the U.S. government violated the criminal law by leaking the contents of Flynn’s intercepted communications.

In the spectrum of crimes involving the leaking of classified information, publicly revealing the contents of SIGINT — signals intelligence — is one of the most serious felonies. Journalists (and all other nongovernmental citizens) can be prosecuted under federal law for disclosing classified information only under the narrowest circumstances; reflecting how serious SIGINT is considered to be, one of those circumstances includes leaking the contents of intercepted communications, as defined this way by 18 § 798 of the U.S. Code:

Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates … or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes … any classified information … obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of any foreign government … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

While the leftist Greenwald goes on to write that he believes the leaks are justified (his bias is obvious) the larger point is that the leaks were criminal in nature and yet not a peep from the mainstream media or the Democrats.

The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington? Will these leaks be happening as I deal on N.Korea etc?

It’s quite the opposite, while President Trump pointed out the problem with agencies packed with embittered, ideological Obama loyalists leaking like sieves the opposition was unified in working their way up the food chain to Trump himself.

As for why Trump violated the golden rule of politics – never give your enemies the knife that they will use to cut your throat with – by throwing Flynn to the wolves is unknown but if the left and their media and Deep State allies go on to oust him from office, history will show that this debacle triggered his downfall.

Now blood is in the street and the hyenas will lust for more. The Trump magic is broken. He has shown vulnerability. Now they will go after their next target within the Trump administration and then the next and the next until they have Trump isolated and by the balls. He just invited them to proceed. All major foreign policy moves he planned will be hampered. The detente with Russia has probably ended before it even started.

Flynn is no big loss for the world, the U.S. or the Trump administration. But Trump has now lost the initiative. He long managed to set the media agenda for the day by this or that “outrageous” tweet or remark. Now this advantage has been taken away from him over some nonsense allegations and his lack of backing for one of his top people.

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Donn Marten is a libertarian critic of the corrupt establishment as well as a patriot seeking to do my part to make America great again. Donn has a unique insight and has written at such sites as Titanic Brass, Downtrend, The Federalist Papers Project, OpEd News, RINF and others.